If you are still watching this thread, now that I have had some time to think further about your original statement in Reply #116:

Quote:

But, I would think that if your Vista hard drive dies and you have no choice but to restore to a new, unused disk, that might you increase your chances of success to 100% again if you take the time to do a preliminary clean install of bare Vista on the hard drive from the original media first.This would make any required MBR (and any other)? modifications to the hard drive…. then go ahead and restore your previously made Ghost 2003 image over the top of that in the DOS environment. Now your chance of failure should be reduced to about as close to zero as you can get?

I think your hope of reducing the *failure* of restoring and having a successful bootable Vista OS was doomed from the start--at least without having to do a *repair* of the boot process!

The bottom line was that the Master Boot Record (MBR) NT signature was being zeroed out by the default restore process of Ghost 2003 or Ghost 8.x--and Vista's boot loader was unforgiving of that change (I presume a new NT-signature is created when you boot a Vista system--just as a new NT signature is created upon first boot of a WinXP system--even before the Windows interface ever is accessed for loading)--whereas WinXP would simple see a new NT signature and run a sub-routine to re-assign drive letters anew for the existing partitions.

Using the *-FDSP* switch prevents the NT signature from being zeroed and restores the original NT signature of the partition that the image file was made from--Vista would boot fine now!

Or, using the *BCDEDIT's*, changes Vista's behavior so it no longer *requires* the NT signature to match the previous NT signature--thus making Vista act like how WinXP acts in this regard.

So, creating the MBR by installing from the Vista installation disc, although the MBR now matches the original MBR of the original Vista installation--the disk NT signature will be different--and Vista will fail to boot until a repair is done! The repair must simply make Vista accept the new NT signature so it points to the correct partition to find the next boot loader file that is needed--i.e. the *winload.exe*!

Windows Vista apparently does not *care* if the MBR is the old style *63 sectors* or the new style *200* sectors--only the absolute sector 0 is *critical*, and the NT signature has to match!

An interesting test would be to use MBRWizard in DOS to look at the NT signature, record those 4 data points, restore a Vista Ghost 2003 image without any switches, and then use MBRWizard to manually edit those four data points for the NT signature to be the same as the original NT signature as recorded originally above--and then see if the boot is successful without any further *repair*!

Guess I don't see it that way! What I was looking for was to find a method and gain confidence in it for "saving" my Vista system in case something catastrophic happened to it. For example, if the hard drive that contained my system partition died, I wanted to be back and running off a new hard drive in say, a few hours at most. It has been my practice in the past with both Win2K and XP systems to periodically clone to my system partition to another "spare" hard drive via an intermediate step of writing the image to CDR or DVD discs. Then I always at least boot off the newly cloned drive to assure myself that it is "ok", before storing it away on a closet shelf.

So, at that point I have a ready-to-go hard drive, and a set of optical media containing the backup image. Plus I'm pretty sure they are both good since the drive was cloned from the image saved on discs, and it boots!

The requirement to do a repair from the Vista installation disc under certain circumstances troubles me not at all. It is a quick, easy, almost trivial step and has worked for me 12 times now, every time. So my confidence level is high that should it come to that, the two step process of restoring the image to a new drive then doing a Repair, is certain to get me going again.

The requirement of having the original Vista installation disc in order to complete the repair is quite acceptable to me. I dislike systems packaged by OEM's that contain lots of bloatware as well as the operating system and I much prefer a clean install from a set of purchased Microsoft operating system discs. I'll always have the operating system installation disc and recommend that others take this same approach.

I'm happy that within these constraints, a copy of both the Ghost 2003 CDR and the Vista DVD is all I need to do the job. Won't work for all, but it will work for some, and that is why I took the time to write it up.

That being said, your comments about the zeroed NT Signature messing up the Vista boot process, or using BCDedit to fix Vista so it doesn't care seem to nicely summarize the situation. I was starting to gain an appreciation for some of this after reading earlier posts in this thread and in the threads that Brian referenced in reply #123 above. And, it appears that the MBR reference you provide is excellent. The proposed test is intriguing. I will have to dig into that for the challenge and learning experience, if nothing else.

But, for now, I feel that my original question about the viability of using Ghost 2003 images to backup and restore a Vista system is answered – "You Bet – just keep your Vista installation disc handy!"

Didn't mean to imply that your solution wasn't a *good* one--it is--and it was good to see that the *repair* process using the Vista installation CD not only works, but apparently Vista gives you a message as to what needs to be done to do the repair!

Just out of curiosity, do you have to enter an *Administrator* name and *password* to get access to that repair process? I think WinXP's Recovery Console requires that for access to its use!

What I meant by:

Quote:

I think your hope of reducing the *failure* of restoring and having a successful bootable Vista OS was doomed from the start--at least without having to do a *repair* of the boot process!

was that you were not going to get a bootable OS without additional steps--be it the repair process, possibly using MBRWizard to edit back in the original NT signature,--or if you use the Ghost *-fdsp* switch to begin with, or the *bcedit* changes--that would eliminate the added repair step or MBR editing!

Just out of curiosity, do you have to enter an *Administrator* name and *password* to get access to that repair process? I think WinXP's Recovery Console requires that for access to its use!

No, entry of a userid or password is not required. You just select "Repair my computer", and it spends a few seconds "looking for your operating system", then offers a small dialog box that has a "Repair and Restart" button. Click it and in 5 sec the system will start a successfully reboot. I never hear the installation disc spin up at that point, so it apparently has already loaded all it needs to complete the repair. (Although I never timed it, it takes maybe a minute from the time you start the boot off the Vista installation DVD to get to the "Select Language" screen with the "Repair my Computer" target.) The product key is not required either.

Quote:

...was that you were not going to get a bootable OS without additional steps--be it the repair process, possibly using MBRWizard to edit back in the original NT signature,--or if you use the Ghost *-fdsp* switch to begin with, or the *bcedit* changes--that would eliminate the added repair step or MBR editing!

Yes, I agree with all that, and it WOULD be nice not to have to do the Repair step!

perhaps a solution for those who work with ghost 8.2?what I did was the following.install ghost solution suite 2do a liveupdatecopy ghost32.exe (version 11.0.1 vista compatible) and renamed it to restoreghost.exeinserted it with ultraiso to my ghost9 (which had ghost 8.2) bootable cd (because this cd supports my sil3114 raid chip) and now i can backup my vista without using any switches or what ever.it just works.

Just a follow-up to previous postings regarding activation: Previous postings had been related to a Vista system that was less than 30 days old and had not yet been activated.

Since that time I have activated the system (some time back already) and two days ago decided to upgrade that system to use a 320 GB hard drive instead of the original 160 GB drive.

Bottom line report is that the Vista system partition restore worked again, this time with a slight twist, and that re-activation was not required. Details follow:

Just for kicks, I tried restoring an old, pre-activation Ghost 2003 image to the new 320 GB drive. The restore worked, but of course on reboot, Vista reported that it needed to be activated, and that it was operating at reduced functionality so that I could purchase a license on-line if I so desired. Of course this was expected and I didn't go any further, but I had just wanted to see how the system would act.

Then I made a new, up-to-date Ghost 2003 image of the now-activated Vista system running on the old 160 GB drive. (FYI, my system partition is now 22 GB and the resulting image at high compression was around 10 GB.) I saved the image to another partition on the 160 GB drive, then after rebooting, I copied the image to a 2nd networked computer.

Installed only the 320 GB (new, out-of-box) drive, booted from the Ghost 9.0 CDR, installed network support, and because I knew I'd need it later, used the 9.0 "Rewrite MBR" utility on the new drive. Then after mapping a drive letter to the networked machine where the new image was waiting, I used the "Restore Legacy Ghost Image" utility to restore the image to the new 320 GB drive over the network. Took about 25 min.

A slight twist this time on reboot. I DID NOT immediately received the expected "missing winload.exe" message which from past experience I knew I could fix using the REPAIR option from the Vista installation DVD. Instead I received a message stating: "A disk read error occurred. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart." I tried CTRL-ALT-DEL a few times, but no joy. I vaguely recalled seeing this once before, could not recall the exact circumstance, but I had fixed it by rewriting the MBR using gdisk found in the support folder of the Ghost 2003 CDROM. Well….. this time I'd already done that before restoring the image using the Ghost 9.0 utility to accomplish the same thing. ???

But, just to be sure, I rewrote the MBR again, this time using the gdisk utility from the Ghost 2003 CD-ROM. Success! On reboot, the familiar "missing winload.exe" screen appeared instead of the complaint about a disk read error, and I knew my way home from there. I ran the repair from the Vista installation DVD and all was well. On reboot, it came up to the desktop then immediately asked to be rebooted again, and after that it was solid.

I've been using the system heavily for two days now and all is fine running on the new 320 GB drive. Once again, using Ghost 2003 to accomplish the upgrade (and applying the required Repair from the Vista installation DVD) worked fine.

Note that the activation question never came up. Vista apparently decided that my changing JUST the hard drive on my system was not sufficient cause to require re-activation.

I recall reading that an example situation where re-activation would be required would be where TWO major components were changed at the same time, for example the hard drive AND RAM. Seems like a sane approach to me. Some time I'd like to try changing JUST the motherboard to see what that might do to activation.

So – Why did I have to do the 2nd "rewrite MBR" operation? Not sure…. Maybe you have to do it AFTER the image is restored? Maybe the utility to accomplish it is different as furnished on the Ghost 2003 CD-ROM vs. the Ghost 9.0 disc?

Anyway, I continued to gain confidence in using Ghost 2003 to make and restore Vista system partition images. You just have to accept the added steps of re-writing the MBR (probably only on new and wiped drives) and doing a REPAIR from the Vista installation DVD.

I am not sure where to start this post as my reading of the dates seems skewed. I have been able to back up both Vista 64 Ultimate and Vista 32 Business editions. The restored images work well and seem completely error free. I used a partition back up because I do not have a disk with but a single partition on it. Well I do but it’s a 6 Gb ATA drive and that drive has Linux on it. Which by the by can also be backed up using Ghost 2003.

About the time that this thread was started, I installed Vista Ult. Beta on a brand new PC that I had just built. It worked OK.

Now, being a huge Ghost fan, don't you just know that using Ghost on Vista was one of my first things to try. Good ol' Ghost 2003, build 793 worked fine. Also Ghost 8.3, build 1331 worked without any problem. I said so right here in this forum, but I guess not in this particular thread.

The answer is still the same.....now with Vista Ultimate full retail version.Ghost 2003 and Ghost 8.3 just WORK. After all, Ghost doesn't give a hoot what the data actually is. It backs up ones and zeros .... files and folders, even on an NTFS partition.

I see this thread has gone to 10 pages. ??? The question could have been answered on page one.Case closed!

Ghost 2003 works great on Vista.I'm still using the same boot floppy I used on Win-98 and revised to work with XP.

Shadow

PS: I recently restored a Ghost Image file to a new hard drive that had not been pre-formatted.It wouldn't boot. I booted up with my Windows ME utilities disk and ran FDISK /mbr and that fixed the problem. From then on, the disk booted just fine.I say this because I know this problem has come up, over and over.

The answer is still the same.....now with Vista Ultimate full retail version.Ghost 2003 and Ghost 8.3 just WORK.

Very interesting report!

I know from your previous posts that you always (?) use FAT32 rather than NTFS partitions.

Is that true of your Vista installation?

Did you pre-partition and format the Vista partition using Fdisk or other DOS partitioning tool--(I doubt the Vista installation disc would offer you the option of FAT32--maybe it does, but at some minimum size like WinXP does?).

If you install Vista to a FAT32 partition, I wonder if that alters Vista's default setup and behavior that has, for many, prevented Ghost 2003 from working properly--at least not without some sort of adjustments!

I wonder if installing to a FAT32 partition prevents Vista from using its new boot files, the Boot Configuration Data (BCD), that previous posts indicated needed to be edited using the *BCDEdit.exe* data editor to make Vista act more like WinXP when the Disk ID has be altered.

Because, Ghost 2003's default behavior is to zero the Disk ID--and Vista's boot sequence faltered if that happens--unless the BCD settings where adjusted.

Vista will NOT install on a FAT-32 formatted partition.If you're installing Vista as an upgrade over XP, the partition must be in NTFS, or converted to NTFS before Vista will install. That's just the way it works.

Doing a backup and restore as a DISK image and not a partition image, negates the problem of the mbr being screwed up. Doing a partition image restore to a new HD, does require that you run FDISK from a DOS boot disk of some type, and run "FDISK /mbr" to fix the boot sector. Then Vista will boot OK. This was the same problem I found in XP.It's been well documented here in this forum.

The simplest fix for me was to just format the new hard drive first, making the partitions I wanted, and formatting the HD in DOS, before restoring the old drive image with Ghost.Besides the obvious thing, of getting my new HD partitioned, it also exercises the HD and verifies that it's working perfectly, before you install the OS, Disk Image, etc.